


i'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret

by postcardmystery



Series: the world ablaze, that's the best for me [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-25
Updated: 2013-07-25
Packaged: 2017-12-21 08:49:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/898306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world’s on fire and it’s time to, as <i>he</i> says, go big or go home. It’s just a patella, a femur, a tibia. The whole planet’s an open wound, and it’s your job to stitch it back together. You fit. You match. You’re going to get through this surgery if it kills you. You’ve given them everything, and you’re right, you know you are. You’re a cripple, and a genius, and both things notwithstanding, you’re going to save the bloody world. Now watch, or get out of the buggering way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm not the cruel type, but they are, and that's the secret

**Author's Note:**

> Companion piece to [that's what they want: a God damned show](http://archiveofourown.org/works/890296/). Warnings for bipolar disorder, disability and associated slurs, war and death.

1\. It’s the leg, it’s always, always, always and without fail, the bloody leg. The world you live in is different from what it used to be, but it’s not that different, and you’re reminded every time your cane clacks against the floor. This is a world of walking wounded, but you were born this way, and in times of war it pays to be a presentable, packageable whole. You let their eyes slip over you, let them believe what they will, think that this was something which was done to you merely than something which _is_ , and you correct them only if they ask, and only because you’re a stickler for corrections. Make them slow to your pace. Make them give you a little extra space, itself hard-won, because a little has swiftly become a lot, in times such as these. Let your lip curl and your tone run dry as ice and cut _them_ off at the knees if they dare challenge you, because you earned your place at this table and half the time they’re just window decoration. The world’s on fire and it’s time to, as _he_ says, go big or go home. It’s just a patella, a femur, a tibia. The whole planet’s an open wound, and it’s your job to stitch it back together. You fit. You match. You’re going to get through this surgery if it kills you. You’ve given them everything, and you’re right, you know you are. You’re a cripple, and a genius, and both things notwithstanding, you’re going to save the bloody world. Now watch, or get out of the buggering way.

 

 

2\. You were born a soldier. You were born _to_ a soldier, too, but that’s something which time has swallowed, made hurt a little less. He loved you because, despite, and all those other words that people use like smokescreens, to try and make you think they’ve forgotten that your leg’s an Eton mess of damage and that your father always wanted a son who could follow in his footsteps, which, unlike yours, leave even prints in snow, sand, the mud of the land he trains in. He did the only thing he knew how to do, which was boarding school, followed by more boarding school, followed by the youngest PHD candidate in the history of TU Berlin. He’d been trained since he was five years old, and now, thanks to that, so have you. Your father’s not a soldier anymore, except for how he is, a doctorate to match and a wall to build to keep the Kaiju out. War changes us all, and you know it better than anyone, but he still won’t answer your calls. War is the answer to a question your father’s been asking you since the day you were born, and it’s been more than thirty years, but even though you know the answer, the question, you also know, twisting in your chest like a knife, hurting more than your leg ever will, it escapes you still.

 

 

3\. He’s the only one who’s never pretended. He’s the only one who’s always treated you as an equal since day one. (An equal, not a superior, because Lord knows he doesn’t think he has any of those.) It doesn’t matter what you call him, there are some baits he’ll never rise to. It doesn’t matter what you call him, he’ll hiss and yell and, on one memorable occasion, piss on your desk, but he’ll still be there. Not like clockwork, no, because those springs within him are broken and no medication in the Western hemisphere could fix them, but he’ll be there, eventually, in his own time. Every single thing about him bothers you, twists beneath your skin like old hurts, a litany of things you can’t ignore and can’t ever learn not to hate. He smiles like the impact of a freight train and you want to shake him off like a dog drying itself, like brushing chalk dust off your cuffs, but you can’t. He smiles and you hate it, and he doesn’t, and you hate that even more. You hate him and he riles you like he lives for it, and it takes you a humiliatingly long length of time to realise, well, _quite_.

 

 

4\. Pretend it doesn’t hurt. Pretend, obfuscate, use every ounce of your genius to conceal what, precisely, _it_ is. Pretend, for the benefit of others, that your leg is what makes you bitter, that the soreness in your soul can be blamed on a malformed kneecap, and not despair in the face of a world that’s sliding into a very literal abyss, one day at a time. Pretend that you think the world worth saving. Pretend that you -- genius, jack of all scientific trades bar one, arguable madman -- pretend that you, last bastion against humanity’s destruction, think that you’re as good as a wall across half a continent, and fail, fail every time. Pretend until Newton Geiszler dares you to do better, and shock yourself more than you ever have in your life, do.

 

 

5\. Offer him a scalpel, because he’s forgotten that he can’t call implements to his hand with telekinesis, for about the thousandth time. Offer to correct his figures, check his data, ensure that his equations balance. He’s your colleague, your comrade, a soldier in a war so specific that now there’s only two of you left, and you cannot even contemplate the irony of that, that the man watching your back is the only one alive who’d stab you in it just to see if you’d pull the knife out and return the favour. He’s not your friend. You keep telling yourself that, and you’re sure, you’re so entirely sure, that one of these days, the world is going to prove you right. (Of course, it hasn’t yet, but you can wait it out. You’re very good at that, and you’re only getting better.)

 

 

6\. Hate him, because it’s keeping you alive. It’s keeping the both of you alive, and you hate him the way you’d believe in God, the way you believe in the chalk beneath your fingers and the ground beneath your feet. He’s a lightning strike and the adage says that lightning never strikes twice, but he hits you over and over and over again, and you don’t think he even knows he’s doing it, you don’t think he’d even know how to stop if he did. You hate him so much that you can’t bear to tear your eyes away, even for a second, because if you blink he’ll shift and you’ll lose your grip and you can’t lose, not now, not at the end of everything with the earth shaking beneath you and his mocking grin always just outside the corner of your eye. You hate him like slitting your wrists, like jumping into an ice-cold lake, like falling in love, and it’s a good thing that the world is ending, because every time he grins at you, rockstar and arrogant and the most irritating tosser you’ve ever met in your life, it feels like it already did.

 

 

7\. Don’t ever let them see you stumble.

 

 

8\. You realize too late that perhaps that is what love is: a lab divided down the middle with black tape, and it never occurring to either of you for four years straight to simply ask Petecost if the two most important scientists on earth could have a damn lab of their own each, if it’s not too much trouble. It hits you like hail, like a solar storm, like the damned lightning that he’s become to you, that this is what love is, what love means to you: through a mirror, darkly, an almost-reflection of yourself. It’s listening to him ramble at three in the morning, drunk on his own brain and glorying in it, telling yourself that you don’t want to see what lies beneath those white shirts, that you hate those sodding tattoos and that you hate his voice, his hair, the way he always waits for you to catch up to him without being asked in the mess and has, on occasion, physically intervened to ensure that no one else eats the last of those particular apples that you favour above all others. Maybe love will always be tinted with hatred for you, maybe it will always be a little bitter, and a lot unkind. But so’s he, and he hates you to match you, with the intensity of a star going out, and that, somehow, answers a question you’re beginning to suspect that you’re never going to need to ask at all.

 

 

9\. Make them acknowledge you, and never apologise for it. Make them give you the only seat, make them listen when you pitch your voice low and use words that are certainly within their paygrade -- they make more than you, after all -- but well outside their capacity to understand. Make them shut up and fold their arms and give you the respect you damn well deserve, after fifteen years of this, after being the bloke with the dodgy leg during the apocalypse, and when Newt winks at you from the corner of the room after you make a Major General cry, do not wink back-- but want to, and be honest in your want, as you can be with little else, especially now, especially in the face of this.

 

 

10\. _We speak the same language_ , he says, and you think of phone calls at five in the morning and Kaiju guts on the ceiling and all the novels you’d have never read and the arguments you’d never have had and the wants and hates and petty little grievances you’d never have had the chance to celebrate or hide, of how his brain shines like a light in a dark, dark place, but is equally dark in its own way, the strange glorious reversal of a film negative, bringing murk to all the corners of your brain that you thought were neat and clean and empty, and think, _no, no, thank Christ._

11\. Don’t worry when he goes out and doesn’t come back. Don’t worry when you find him sprawled across his filthy side of the lab, blood running from his nose in rivers and your name on his lips. Don’t worry when he does come back and there’s blood in his hair and and you love him, you love him, you love him, and it packs a punch so hard that it makes you hate him even more. Don’t worry, because the world is ending, and surely the time for worry is over. Don’t worry, and don’t love him, and if you keep saying these things, maybe they’ll become true, even though you’re supposed to be a scientist, and you can spot the flaw in that hypothesis from a mile off.

 

 

12\. You’re not him, you’re not a rockstar, you’re not the centre of every room without trying, although you can be the centre with very little effort, time’s harsh lessons have taught you that much. You’re one of the smartest scientists alive, even if your shoes have Kaiju unmentionables on them and you share a lab with a man who would not seem out of place in Bedlam. You’re humanity’s last hope and sometimes you have to use a chair in the shower. You’re supposed to save the world and sometimes you can’t walk three metres without needing a rest. You’re going to close that bloody rift if it kills you, and sometimes you can barely get up in the morning, sometimes you can barely make it out the door. But it doesn’t matter. If the Jaeger have taught you anything, it’s that a body is just a body. You’ve built your own kingdom, with all two of you, entrails in the airducts and chalk dust on both your hands, and no matter what anybody else thinks, here the brain is king, so please tone down your language and listen to what I am sure will be hopelessly over your head, can’t be helped, old boy, _if you’d be so kind._

13\. When he leaps, look. When you decide to follow him, the wind in your hair and his eyes locked on your face, sick with wonder, don’t even stop to think if it’ll hurt once you hit the ground, if there’ll even be ground to hit, if there’ll even be a world to wake up in once you wake up. Trust him because he never looks, and because you always do, and put that ridiculous bloody headset on and hope that it doesn’t get through the drift that you want the last thought you ever have to be his name. (Yes. His first one.)

 

 

14\. You should’ve died doing this. That’s the truth, the one you’d want to escape, if you hadn’t given up on lies from the moment you put the helmet on and risked your life doing the stupidest thing any human has possibly ever done in the history of civilisation. You saved the world and you still have very little conception of how you did it and your thoughts are a red-tinged, humiliating jumble: does he _really_ find me that attractive, oh, Christ, what if he saw the thing about his wrists and my belt, and God, God, I wish I’d been brave enough to ask to hold his hand.

 

 

15\. Forget everything you thought you knew, the person you thought you were, the person you saw in him, and go back to your chalkboard, realise that you were right all along, you just needed to change a few variables and everything came out clean, clear as day and dark and bitter as night in a Hong Kong alleyway in the wrong part of town. Smile at him, a tiny tug at the corner of your mouth that most people would miss, but only when he’s done something particularly brilliant, and make him fight, make him prove himself for every single bloody one. Give out smirks like they’re benedictions, and not only because now you have the added bonus of knowing that they make his cock twitch inside his ridiculously tight trousers every single time. Rule the roost and snarl until they start asking the right questions, and never need to ask to hold his hand, ever again, for as long as you both shall live, although you’ll be damned if he’s bringing that sodding parasite home with you, by God, there’ll never be enough alcohol in the world. Be the soldier you were born as, and born to be, and when he dares you match him, match him, match him, and trust that he’ll never stop pushing and you’ll never stop rolling your r’s, and love him, hate him, dream his dreams and hold his hand and make the world kneel because you can’t, because he likes it when you get mean, and because the world is going to give you everything you ever asked for, because you’re a rockstar, apparently, and you let him raise your hands in victory, drag you into a bow, tell the story of how you saved the world, and when you kiss him, in front of the entire world you saved, don’t hold back, use teeth.


End file.
